NeurIPS 2023 论文列表

Although there has been work to develop ex-post private mechanisms from Ligett et al. '17 and Whitehouse et al '22 that seeks to provide privacy guarantees subject to a target level of accuracy, there was not a way to use them in conjunction with differentially private mechanisms. Furthermore, there has yet to be work in developing a theory for how these ex-post privacy mechanisms compose, so that we can track the accumulated privacy over several mechanisms. We develop privacy filters that allow an analyst to adaptively switch between differentially private mechanisms and ex-post private mechanisms subject to an overall privacy loss guarantee. We show that using a particular ex-post private mechanism --- noise reduction mechanisms --- can substantially outperform baseline approaches that use existing privacy loss composition bounds. We use the common task of returning as many counts as possible subject to a relative error guarantee and an overall privacy budget as a motivating example.

The use of machine learning models in high-stake applications (e.g., healthcare, lending, college admission) has raised growing concerns due to potential biases against protected social groups. Various fairness notions and methods have been proposed to mitigate such biases. In this work, we focus on Counterfactual Fairness (CF), a fairness notion that is dependent on an underlying causal graph and first proposed by Kusner $\textit{et al.}$; it requires that the outcome an individual perceives is the same in the real world as it would be in a "counterfactual" world, in which the individual belongs to another social group. Learning fair models satisfying CF can be challenging. It was shown in (Kusner $\textit{et al.}$) that a sufficient condition for satisfying CF is to $\textbf{not}$ use features that are descendants of sensitive attributes in the causal graph. This implies a simple method that learns CF models only using non-descendants of sensitive attributes while eliminating all descendants. Although several subsequent works proposed methods that use all features for training CF models, there is no theoretical guarantee that they can satisfy CF. In contrast, this work proposes a new algorithm that trains models using all the available features. We theoretically and empirically show that models trained with this method can satisfy CF.

Open-vocabulary 3D Object Detection (OV-3DDet) aims to detect objects from an arbitrary list of categories within a 3D scene, which remains seldom explored in the literature. There are primarily two fundamental problems in OV-3DDet, *i.e.*, localizing and classifying novel objects. This paper aims at addressing the two problems simultaneously via a unified framework, under the condition of limited base categories. To localize novel 3D objects, we propose an effective 3D Novel Object Discovery strategy, which utilizes both the 3D box geometry priors and 2D semantic open-vocabulary priors to generate pseudo box labels of the novel objects. To classify novel object boxes, we further develop a cross-modal alignment module based on discovered novel boxes, to align feature spaces between 3D point cloud and image/text modalities. Specifically, the alignment process contains a class-agnostic and a class-discriminative alignment, incorporating not only the base objects with annotations but also the increasingly discovered novel objects, resulting in an iteratively enhanced alignment. The novel box discovery and crossmodal alignment are jointly learned to collaboratively benefit each other. The novel object discovery can directly impact the cross-modal alignment, while a better feature alignment can, in turn, boost the localization capability, leading to a unified OV-3DDet framework, named **CoDA**, for simultaneous novel object localization and classification. Extensive experiments on two challenging datasets (*i.e.*, SUN-RGBD and ScanNet) demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and also show a significant mAP improvement upon the best-performing alternative method by 80%. Codes and pre-trained models are released on [the project page](https://yangcaoai.github.io/publications/CoDA.html).

Previous work has shown that DNNs with large depth $L$ and $L_{2}$-regularization are biased towards learning low-dimensional representations of the inputs, which can be interpreted as minimizing a notion of rank $R^{(0)}(f)$ of the learned function $f$, conjectured to be the Bottleneck rank. We compute finite depth corrections to this result, revealing a measure $R^{(1)}$ of regularity which bounds the pseudo-determinant of the Jacobian $\left\|Jf(x)\right\|\_\+$ and is subadditive under composition and addition. This formalizes a balance between learning low-dimensional representations and minimizing complexity/irregularity in the feature maps, allowing the network to learn the `right' inner dimension. Finally, we prove the conjectured bottleneck structure in the learned features as $L\to\infty$: for large depths, almost all hidden representations are approximately $R^{(0)}(f)$-dimensional, and almost all weight matrices $W_{\ell}$ have $R^{(0)}(f)$ singular values close to 1 while the others are $O(L^{-\frac{1}{2}})$. Interestingly, the use of large learning rates is required to guarantee an order $O(L)$ NTK which in turns guarantees infinite depth convergence of the representations of almost all layers.

The ability to create high-quality 3D faces from a single image has become increasingly important with wide applications in video conferencing, AR/VR, and advanced video editing in movie industries. In this paper, we propose Face Diffusion NeRF (FaceDNeRF), a new generative method to reconstruct high-quality Face NeRFs from single images, complete with semantic editing and relighting capabilities. FaceDNeRF utilizes high-resolution 3D GAN inversion and expertly trained 2D latent-diffusion model, allowing users to manipulate and construct Face NeRFs in zero-shot learning without the need for explicit 3D data. With carefully designed illumination and identity preserving loss, as well as multi-modal pre-training, FaceDNeRF offers users unparalleled control over the editing process enabling them to create and edit face NeRFs using just single-view images, text prompts, and explicit target lighting. The advanced features of FaceDNeRF have been designed to produce more impressive results than existing 2D editing approaches that rely on 2D segmentation maps for editable attributes. Experiments show that our FaceDNeRF achieves exceptionally realistic results and unprecedented flexibility in editing compared with state-of-the-art 3D face reconstruction and editing methods. Our code will be available at https://github.com/BillyXYB/FaceDNeRF.

Deep deraining networks consistently encounter substantial generalization issues when deployed in real-world applications, although they are successful in laboratory benchmarks. A prevailing perspective in deep learning encourages using highly complex data for training, with the expectation that richer image background content will facilitate overcoming the generalization problem. However, through comprehensive and systematic experimentation, we discover that this strategy does not enhance the generalization capability of these networks. On the contrary, it exacerbates the tendency of networks to overfit specific degradations. Our experiments reveal that better generalization in a deraining network can be achieved by simplifying the complexity of the training background images. This is because that the networks are ``slacking off'' during training, that is, learning the least complex elements in the image background and degradation to minimize training loss. When the background images are less complex than the rain streaks, the network will prioritize the background reconstruction, thereby suppressing overfitting the rain patterns and leading to improved generalization performance. Our research offers a valuable perspective and methodology for better understanding the generalization problem in low-level vision tasks and displays promising potential for practical application.

Handling out-of-distribution (OOD) samples has become a major stake in the real-world deployment of machine learning systems. This work explores the use of self-supervised contrastive learning to the simultaneous detection of two types of OOD samples: unseen classes and adversarial perturbations. First, we pair self-supervised contrastive learning with the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) two-sample test. This approach enables us to robustly test whether two independent sets of samples originate from the same distribution, and we demonstrate its effectiveness by discriminating between CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-10.1 with higher confidence than previous work. Motivated by this success, we introduce CADet (Contrastive Anomaly Detection), a novel method for OOD detection of single samples. CADet draws inspiration from MMD, but leverages the similarity between contrastive transformations of a same sample. CADet outperforms existing adversarial detection methods in identifying adversarially perturbed samples on ImageNet and achieves comparable performance to unseen label detection methods on two challenging benchmarks: ImageNet-O and iNaturalist. Significantly, CADet is fully self-supervised and requires neither labels for in-distribution samples nor access to OOD examples.

Policy gradient lies at the core of deep reinforcement learning (RL) in continuous domains. Despite much success, it is often observed in practice that RL training with policy gradient can fail for many reasons, even on standard control problems with known solutions. We propose a framework for understanding one inherent limitation of the policy gradient approach: the optimization landscape in the policy space can be extremely non-smooth or fractal for certain classes of MDPs, such that there does not exist gradient to be estimated in the first place. We draw on techniques from chaos theory and non-smooth analysis, and analyze the maximal Lyapunov exponents and H\"older exponents of the policy optimization objectives. Moreover, we develop a practical method that can estimate the local smoothness of objective function from samples to identify when the training process has encountered fractal landscapes. We show experiments to illustrate how some failure cases of policy optimization can be explained by such fractal landscapes.

Gradual Domain Adaptation (GDA), in which the learner is provided with additional intermediate domains, has been theoretically and empirically studied in many contexts. Despite its vital role in security-critical scenarios, the adversarial robustness of the GDA model remains unexplored. In this paper, we adopt the effective gradual self-training method and replace vanilla self-training with adversarial self-training (AST). AST first predicts labels on the unlabeled data and then adversarially trains the model on the pseudo-labeled distribution. Intriguingly, we find that gradual AST improves not only adversarial accuracy but also clean accuracy on the target domain. We reveal that this is because adversarial training (AT) performs better than standard training when the pseudo-labels contain a portion of incorrect labels. Accordingly, we first present the generalization error bounds for gradual AST in a multiclass classification setting. We then use the optimal value of the Subset Sum Problem to bridge the standard error on a real distribution and the adversarial error on a pseudo-labeled distribution. The result indicates that AT may obtain a tighter bound than standard training on data with incorrect pseudo-labels. We further present an example of a conditional Gaussian distribution to provide more insights into why gradual AST can improve the clean accuracy for GDA.

Articulated object manipulation is a fundamental yet challenging task in robotics. Due to significant geometric and semantic variations across object categories, previous manipulation models struggle to generalize to novel categories. Few-shot learning is a promising solution for alleviating this issue by allowing robots to perform a few interactions with unseen objects. However, extant approaches often necessitate costly and inefficient test-time interactions with each unseen instance. Recognizing this limitation, we observe that despite their distinct shapes, different categories often share similar local geometries essential for manipulation, such as pullable handles and graspable edges - a factor typically underutilized in previous few-shot learning works. To harness this commonality, we introduce 'Where2Explore', an affordance learning framework that effectively explores novel categories with minimal interactions on a limited number of instances. Our framework explicitly estimates the geometric similarity across different categories, identifying local areas that differ from shapes in the training categories for efficient exploration while concurrently transferring affordance knowledge to similar parts of the objects. Extensive experiments in simulated and real-world environments demonstrate our framework's capacity for efficient few-shot exploration and generalization.

This paper outlines an end-to-end optimized lossy image compression framework using diffusion generative models. The approach relies on the transform coding paradigm, where an image is mapped into a latent space for entropy coding and, from there, mapped back to the data space for reconstruction. In contrast to VAE-based neural compression, where the (mean) decoder is a deterministic neural network, our decoder is a conditional diffusion model. Our approach thus introduces an additional "content" latent variable on which the reverse diffusion process is conditioned and uses this variable to store information about the image. The remaining ``texture'' variables characterizing the diffusion process are synthesized at decoding time. We show that the model's performance can be tuned toward perceptual metrics of interest. Our extensive experiments involving multiple datasets and image quality assessment metrics show that our approach yields stronger reported FID scores than the GAN-based model, while also yielding competitive performance with VAE-based models in several distortion metrics. Furthermore, training the diffusion with $\mathcal{X}$-parameterization enables high-quality reconstructions in only a handful of decoding steps, greatly affecting the model's practicality. Our code is available at: https://github.com/buggyyang/CDC_compression

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and the intensifying popularity of ChatGPT-like applications have blurred the boundary of high-quality text generation between humans and machines. However, in addition to the anticipated revolutionary changes to our technology and society, the difficulty of distinguishing LLM-generated texts (AI-text) from human-generated texts poses new challenges of misuse and fairness, such as fake content generation, plagiarism, and false accusations of innocent writers. While existing works show that current AI-text detectors are not robust to LLM-based paraphrasing, this paper aims to bridge this gap by proposing a new framework called RADAR, which jointly trains a $\underline{r}$obust $\underline{A}$I-text $\underline{d}$etector via $\underline{a}$dversarial lea$\underline{r}$ning. RADAR is based on adversarial training of a paraphraser and a detector. The paraphraser's goal is to generate realistic content to evade AI-text detection. RADAR uses the feedback from the detector to update the paraphraser, and vice versa. Evaluated with 8 different LLMs (Pythia, Dolly 2.0, Palmyra, Camel, GPT-J, Dolly 1.0, LLaMA, and Vicuna) across 4 datasets, experimental results show that RADAR significantly outperforms existing AI-text detection methods, especially when paraphrasing is in place. We also identify the strong transferability of RADAR from instruction-tuned LLMs to other LLMs, and evaluate the improved capability of RADAR via GPT-3.5-Turbo.

We introduce an efficient optimization-based meta-learning technique for large-scale neural field training by realizing significant memory savings through automated online context point selection. This is achieved by focusing each learning step on the subset of data with the highest expected immediate improvement in model quality, resulting in the almost instantaneous modeling of global structure and subsequent refinement of high-frequency details. We further improve the quality of our meta-learned initialization by introducing a bootstrap correction resulting in the minimization of any error introduced by reduced context sets while simultaneously mitigating the well-known myopia of optimization-based meta-learning. Finally, we show how gradient re-scaling at meta-test time allows the learning of extremely high-quality neural fields in significantly shortened optimization procedures. Our framework is model-agnostic, intuitive, straightforward to implement, and shows significant reconstruction improvements for a wide range of signals. We provide an extensive empirical evaluation on nine datasets across multiple multiple modalities, demonstrating state-of-the-art results while providing additional insight through careful analysis of the algorithmic components constituting our method. Code is available at https://github.com/jihoontack/GradNCP

Coupled oscillators are being increasingly used as the basis of machine learning (ML) architectures, for instance in sequence modeling, graph representation learning and in physical neural networks that are used in analog ML devices. We introduce an abstract class of *neural oscillators* that encompasses these architectures and prove that neural oscillators are universal, i.e, they can approximate any continuous and casual operator mapping between time-varying functions, to desired accuracy. This universality result provides theoretical justification for the use of oscillator based ML systems. The proof builds on a fundamental result of independent interest, which shows that a combination of forced harmonic oscillators with a nonlinear read-out suffices to approximate the underlying operators.

Temporal hypergraphs provide a powerful paradigm for modeling time-dependent, higher-order interactions in complex systems. Representation learning for hypergraphs is essential for extracting patterns of the higher-order interactions that are critically important in real-world problems in social network analysis, neuroscience, finance, etc. However, existing methods are typically designed only for specific tasks or static hypergraphs. We present CAT-Walk, an inductive method that learns the underlying dynamic laws that govern the temporal and structural processes underlying a temporal hypergraph. CAT-Walk introduces a temporal, higher-order walk on hypergraphs, SetWalk, that extracts higher-order causal patterns. CAT-Walk uses a novel adaptive and permutation invariant pooling strategy, SetMixer, along with a set-based anonymization process that hides the identity of hyperedges. Finally, we present a simple yet effective neural network model to encode hyperedges. Our evaluation on 10 hypergraph benchmark datasets shows that CAT-Walk attains outstanding performance on temporal hyperedge prediction benchmarks in both inductive and transductive settings. It also shows competitive performance with state-of-the-art methods for node classification. (https://github.com/ubc-systopia/CATWalk)

Machine learning for sign languages is bottlenecked by data. In this paper, we present YouTube-ASL, a large-scale, open-domain corpus of American Sign Language (ASL) videos and accompanying English captions drawn from YouTube. With ~1000 hours of videos and >2500 unique signers, YouTube-ASL is ~3x as large and has ~10x as many unique signers as the largest prior ASL dataset. We train baseline models for ASL to English translation on YouTube-ASL and evaluate them on How2Sign, where we achieve a new fine-tuned state of the art of 12.397 BLEU and, for the first time, nontrivial zero-shot results.

Diffusion-based purification defenses leverage diffusion models to remove crafted perturbations of adversarial examples and achieve state-of-the-art robustness. Recent studies show that even advanced attacks cannot break such defenses effectively, since the purification process induces an extremely deep computational graph which poses the potential problem of gradient obfuscation, high memory cost, and unbounded randomness. In this paper, we propose a unified framework DiffAttack to perform effective and efficient attacks against diffusion-based purification defenses, including both DDPM and score-based approaches. In particular, we propose a deviated-reconstruction loss at intermediate diffusion steps to induce inaccurate density gradient estimation to tackle the problem of vanishing/exploding gradients. We also provide a segment-wise forwarding-backwarding algorithm, which leads to memory-efficient gradient backpropagation. We validate the attack effectiveness of DiffAttack compared with existing adaptive attacks on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet. We show that DiffAttack decreases the robust accuracy of models compared with SOTA attacks by over 20\% on CIFAR-10 under $\ell_\infty$ attack $(\epsilon=8/255)$, and over 10\% on ImageNet under $\ell_\infty$ attack $(\epsilon=4/255)$. We conduct a series of ablations studies, and we find 1) DiffAttack with the deviated-reconstruction loss added over uniformly sampled time steps is more effective than that added over only initial/final steps, and 2) diffusion-based purification with a moderate diffusion length is more robust under DiffAttack.

In this paper, we explore a principal way to enhance the quality of object masks produced by different segmentation models. We propose a model-agnostic solution called SegRefiner, which offers a novel perspective on this problem by interpreting segmentation refinement as a data generation process. As a result, the refinement process can be smoothly implemented through a series of denoising diffusion steps. Specifically, SegRefiner takes coarse masks as inputs and refines them using a discrete diffusion process. By predicting the label and corresponding states-transition probabilities for each pixel, SegRefiner progressively refines the noisy masks in a conditional denoising manner. To assess the effectiveness of SegRefiner, we conduct comprehensive experiments on various segmentation tasks, including semantic segmentation, instance segmentation, and dichotomous image segmentation. The results demonstrate the superiority of our SegRefiner from multiple aspects. Firstly, it consistently improves both the segmentation metrics and boundary metrics across different types of coarse masks. Secondly, it outperforms previous model-agnostic refinement methods by a significant margin. Lastly, it exhibits a strong capability to capture extremely fine details when refining high-resolution images. The source code and trained models are available at [SegRefiner.git](https://github.com/MengyuWang826/SegRefiner)

The task of point cloud segmentation, comprising semantic, instance, and panoptic segmentation, has been mainly tackled by designing task-specific network architectures, which often lack the flexibility to generalize across tasks, thus resulting in a fragmented research landscape. In this paper, we introduce ProtoSEG, a prototype-based model that unifies semantic, instance, and panoptic segmentation tasks. Our approach treats these three homogeneous tasks as a classification problem with different levels of granularity. By leveraging a Transformer architecture, we extract point embeddings to optimize prototype-class distances and dynamically learn class prototypes to accommodate the end tasks. Our prototypical design enjoys simplicity and transparency, powerful representational learning, and ad-hoc explainability. Empirical results demonstrate that ProtoSEG outperforms concurrent well-known specialized architectures on 3D point cloud benchmarks, achieving 72.3%, 76.4% and 74.2% mIoU for semantic segmentation on S3DIS, ScanNet V2 and SemanticKITTI, 66.8% mCov and 51.2% mAP for instance segmentation on S3DIS and ScanNet V2, 62.4% PQ for panoptic segmentation on SemanticKITTI, validating the strength of our concept and the effectiveness of our algorithm. The code and models are available at https://github.com/zyqin19/PROTOSEG.